Russia: Claude was used to build software intended to power autonomous \u201ckamikaze\u201d drones.<\/p>\n
The drone swarm was programmed to pick its own targets and crash into them to detonate, without a human making the final call.<\/p>\n
In their programming, the team repeatedly picked a location in Ukraine\u2019s Donetsk region as their target and used VPNs to circumvent Anthropic\u2019s geographic blocks.<\/p>\n
The developers claimed to have received funding from Russian government and military research programmes, though Anthropic assessed the group as a small freelance team rather than an official operation.<\/p>\n
Yemen: A group in northern Yemen used Claude Code to help build weapons.<\/p>\n
It helped design software for a guided rocket, drew up plans for a long-range missile, and helped develop an even faster type of weapon called a hypersonic glide vehicle.<\/p>\n
Anthropic says there\u2019s no proof they finished a working weapon, but the group test-fired one rocket. It apparently failed, because they went back to the AI afterwards asking it to help figure out what went wrong.<\/p>\n
France: Anthropic traced a fake news operation to LKM Company, a French advertising agency.<\/p>\n
Using Claude, it mass-produced political articles on about 70 fake news websites in about 20 languages \u2013 publishing at least 8913 stories.<\/p>\n
Each site was given a made-up journalist\u2019s byline and a fake Twitter\/X account, boosted by hundreds of fake accounts posting comments meant to look like real people.<\/p>\n
The operation flipped its message depending on who was paying, selling what Anthropic called \u201cpropaganda as a service\u201d.<\/p>\n
It targeted the US, Brazil and France, and did a lot of work on the Democratic Republic of the Congo, generally favouring the DRC\u2019s side in its conflict with Rwanda.<\/p>\n
UAE: A UAE-linked influence operation targeted the Muslim Brotherhood and United Nations experts critical of Abu Dhabi\u2019s alleged role in war-ravaged Sudan.<\/p>\n
The operation used Claude to generate reports, advocacy materials, social media content and testimony on Sudan \u2013 calling for \u201ca co-ordinated transatlantic and regional operation to dismantle the Muslim Brotherhood globally\u201d.<\/p>\n
The operation also ghost-wrote official testimonies intended for delivery at the 62nd session of the UN Human Rights Council, drafting them under \u201cspecific restrictions\u201d that the speeches not mention the UAE.<\/p>\n
China: A China-based app studio built a network of more than 20 dating apps that claimed to be staffed by real people but were secretly run by Claude.<\/p>\n
Over just two weeks in April 2026, Anthropic found more than 4700 Claude-powered AI characters chatting with at least 25,000 real users, sending about 2.36 million messages in total.<\/p>\n
To seem more believable, real human workers were mixed in with the bots – about one human for every three AI personas – handling things the AI couldn\u2019t, like video calls.<\/p>\n
– AFP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Russia: Claude was used to build software intended to power autonomous \u201ckamikaze\u201d drones. The drone swarm was programmed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":598804,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[295156,6946,365,95,6166,363,364,7705,39172,39546,130,111,139,69,26859,118185,13181,1560,1517,18434,18727,295157,18088,6211,145,13797,14191,28367],"class_list":["post-598803","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-154page","tag-actors","tag-ai","tag-and","tag-anthropic","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-claude","tag-describing","tag-misuse","tag-more","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-operations","tag-propaganda","tag-released","tag-report","tag-reveals","tag-scams","tag-spyware","tag-statesponsored","tag-surveillance","tag-system","tag-technology","tag-used","tag-weapons","tag-worldwide"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/598803","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=598803"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/598803\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/598804"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=598803"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=598803"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=598803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}